There has never been a more exciting time with respect to the world of data. We are seeing the convergence of a number of significant trends that are fundamental transforming the industry. More types, shapes and sizes than ever before…Where does it come from? 1) Transactional growth in your business. 2) New data sources – image files, sensors driven 3) Moving business online – entirely new channels, with different pace at which the business needs to operate. entirely new scale and scope of the kinds of data we are trying to gain insights fromThe way users are consuming and collaborating on data is changing and it’s setting new expectations, we are all carrying around devices with powerful computational capabilities, and we want to use them with data. And new tech like social networking is teaching people how to collaborate more effectively around information and ideas… Users expectations have changed and they want to be able to do more for themselves, from any device…… Gartner asserts that “By 2015 businesses that build a modern information management system will outperform their peers financially by 20 percent.” McKinsey agrees, confirming that organizations that use data and business analytics to drive decision making are more productive and deliver higher return on equity than those who don’t.

Microsoft has a vision for the new office place and for productivity, which evolves with these new user expectations in mind. It’s about delivering the best experience to users across any device and it’s about enabling new turn-key productivity solutions through the cloud, that are designed to seamlessly integrate as a single integrated, best-of-breed cloud solution. This includes messaging, voice &amp; video, content management, enterprise social, and the investments that we are making in Data &amp; Analytics, otherwise know as Self-Service BI.

What is Power BI?Power BI for Office 365, a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights either on-premise or within a trusted cloud environment. With Power BI for Office 365, customers can connect to data in the cloud or extend their existing on premise data sources and systems to quickly build and deploy self-service BI solutions hosted in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud.Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to do more with their data:- Analyze and present insights from data in compelling visual formats either on premises or in the cloud from Excel.- Share reports and data sets online with data that is always kept up to date.- Ask questions of your data using natural language search and get immediate answers through interactive tables, charts and graphs.- Access and stay connected to data and reports from your mobile devices wherever you are.Power BI addresses several fundamental business needs:Enableself-service BI solutions foreveryday business users with the ease of use and familiarity of a tool they already use – Excel. Excel is the most widely-used analytical tool by information workers. Enable collaboration, connectivity, scale and governance by offering BI in the cloud through Office 365. Users can easily share their data and analysis with colleagues and access reports wherever they go – on their desktop at work, over the Web at home, and on their mobile device. Manage important data for the team and track usage to see who’s accessing the data and what data sets are most often used. Enable organizations to extend their existing investments for on-premise data warehouses and operational systems as well as cloud-based data sources and Hadoop clusters to create secure and easy-to-use self-service BI solutions that can also monitor employee access and usage. Customers can sign up to preview Power BI for Office 365 at www.office.com/powerbi.

Think of this as self-service ETLExplorer: Data Explorer provides a familiar and intuitive experience for finding and connect to data from within Excel. Easily combine and transform data so that it can be analyzed and visualized for deeper insight. Power Query supports a wide variety of data sources including relational, structured and semi-structured, OData, from the Web, Hadoop, as well as Data Search capabilities that provide users with a search experience for data, returning relevant data sets from across the enterprise and from external sources.

In market for a while and gaining traction. What is it? We’ve taken an enterprise grade in-memory database engine and we’ve built it into Excel. Then we build an intuitive, user friendly modeling interface on top of it, so that users can build relationships, create custom measures, hierarchies and KPI’s in the familiar environment of Excel. To do this we introduced DAX, which is an excel like formula language.Power Pivot: Power Pivot brings the power of in-memory database technology and flexible modeling to Excel. Create powerful analytical models in a familiar and flexible environment for fast manipulation and processing of large data sets. Define relationships, create custom measures, hierarchies and KPIs.

Power View: Discover and sharenew insights through interactive data exploration and visualization experiences with Power View in Excel. Power View lets you compile data, charts, and graphs into a single view to bring your data to life.

Power Map: Power Map is a 3D data visualization tool for Excel that provides a powerful method for people to look at information in new ways enabling discoveries in data that might never be seen in traditional 2D tables and charts. “GeoFlow&quot; combines 3D visual exploration with the ability to make direct comparisons of values and identify outliers by seeing data displayed in 2D charts at the same time. &quot;GeoFlow&quot; is the best way to visualize geographic data in Excel 2013 workbooks, with new 3D columns or heat maps. Then play the visualizations over time and share insights captured within your organization through interactive tours.